This invention relates in general to concrete buildings and, more particularly, to an apparatus and method for producing panels employed in constructing such concrete buildings.
Concrete has long been a building material of choice due the substantial structural integrity which it affords. In recent years, various techniques and apparatus have been developed and used in the construction industry for the fabrication of modular concrete buildings. Buildings constructed with most of these devices require substantial labor, a significant portion of which is relatively skilled. Many of these techniques for constructing modular concrete structures involve the erection of relatively massive collapsible forms which are assembled and disassembled within the concrete structure. In several of these prior approaches, substantial time is required for the assembly and disassembly of the concrete forms. The attendant labor cost of this time represents a substantial portion of the overall cost of this type of modular concrete construction.
My U.S. Pat. No. 4,426,060 discloses an apparatus and method for constructing a modular concrete shell housing unit which requires very little skilled labor. Although the invention in that patent significantly reduces the labor and cost of constructing modular housing units, the size and shape of the building to be constructed is limited to the size and shape of the apparatus itself.
Although concrete is an excellent building material, by itself it has relatively poor insulative properties. Building systems have been developed in which the structural strength of concrete and reinforcing wire have been combined with the insulative properties of lightweight insulative foam materials. For example, some contemporary building systems employ three dimensional wire matrix panels such as those shown in FIG. 1, which are attached to the outside of a framing structure arranged in the desired size and shape of a building to be constructed. The wire matrix panel in FIG. 1 has a polyurethane foam insulation core 12 with a wire matrix 14 protruding from both faces of core 12. Once the panels are positioned on the framing structure, fluent concrete 16 or the like, is then introduced to the outside faces of wire matrix panel thus forming a reinforced concrete structure. Insulative foam, such as that employed in the above wire matrix panel, has relatively low structural strength. However, the combined concrete/insulative foam structure in this reinforced concrete panel has both high structural integrity and high insulative properties.
One framing structure which may be employed to temporarily support panels such as those discussed above is described and claimed in my patent application, U.S. Pat. No. 4,742,986, issued May 10, 1988, entitled "Apparatus for Constructing Concrete Buildings", the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.
The panels described above are pre-fabricated, that is, they are built at a location removed from the construction site. Considerable labor and expense are involved in transporting such panels to the construction site. Moreover, if a panel is found to be defective in some manner, either a replacement must be provided from a supply of extra panels which is maintained on site or a replacement panel must be shipped from a remote storage facility to the construction site.